Tag: franciscrickinstitute

Crick PhD Student Summer Symposium 2023

Blog by Sophie Kraunsoe, Research Postgraduate, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction

On the 10th of July, for the second year running, the Francis Crick Institute hosted the Crick-partner Universities PhD Student Summer Symposium providing an opportunity to bring together biosciences students from across London. Students from all stages of their PhDs from first years to final years presented their science and had a chance to network with peers across multiple universities including Imperial College London, UCL and King’s College London.

We kick started the day with a series of excellent mini symposia on topics ranging from neuroscience to cancer and immunology. Talks were contributed by students from all universities and year groups giving the chance to practice communicating science and giving feedback in a supportive and encouraging environment. The breath of topics covered was very impressive and displayed the full range of exciting science that PhD students in London are researching. Discussions were continued after the talks with two poster sessions where more students were able to share their work and network with peers.

The symposium had an additional focus on wellbeing in academia supported by a panel discussion of experts chaired by Fryni Panayidou (Crick student support and wellbeing lead) and including Crick group leader, Jeannine Hess, Imperial faculty of medicine senior tutor, Jeffrey Vernon, PhD student and researcher of the impact of loneliness/mental health on postgraduate student, Luqmaan Waqar and University of Surrey lecturer, Cassie Hazell. All the invited panellists gave a short talk detailing their insights into the problems and possible solutions to tackling how to improve wellbeing in an academic context. This was followed by an engaging discussion based on questions submitted by the audience; there were so many questions that these are being followed up beyond the symposium with an email due to be sent to all attendees with comments on the questions we didn’t have time for on the day.

Following on from the panel discussion, we welcomed keynote speaker, Professor Molly Steven from Imperial College London who gave an inspiring talk on the use of bioengineering tools to address challenging problems in healthcare from diagnostics to therapeutics. Seeing how such a multidisciplinary lab conduct their research was hugely inspiring for our audience.

The day concluded with a networking social of wine, cheese and jazz music providing the ambience and atmosphere to relax and socialise after a long day of science. Prizes were awarded for the best poster and talks in each year group as well as an overall prize after attendees voted for their favourites throughout the day. Hopefully, attendees left feeling more connected to the PhD student community in London having had an opportunity to learn about each other’s research and meet each other in person!

We are very grateful to the Postgraduate Community Fund for their support in organising this event.

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Find out more about the Postgraduate Community Fund

The Crick-Imperial Symposium 2021

Every three years, PhD students from The Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College hold a symposium dedicated to enabling students from both institutions to share their research through posters and talks in a supportive environment. Obviously, this year had to be a little different. The event had to held virtually as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic which posed new challenges. A key objective of this event is the provide a platform for graduate students from a range of scientific backgrounds to network and work together, something we can all agree is much more challenging behind a computer screen!

We decided that alongside using Zoom for the talks we would use Gather.Town for the posters and networking. We felt this best replicated the networking opportunities normally facilitated at these events as Gather.Town lets you speak with people 1-1 and in small groups. You can design different rooms for people to browse (see pictures for the main foyer and Perkin Elmer’s room).

Alongside the PhD speakers we had Professor Aldo Faisal and Geraldine Cox as plenary speakers. Apart from being inspiring and captivating speakers, their talks also complimented the interdisciplinary nature of the symposium.

Professor Faisal is a Professor of AI & Neuroscience jointly at the Dept. of Bioengineering and the Dept. of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Brain & Behaviour Lab. He talked about his work on using wearables to record natural human behaviour and training AI with this data to improve performance of machine vision for self-driving cars or help mobility of wheelchairs of paralysed patients. (find more about his work https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/a.faisal).

Geraldine Cox has degrees in physics and fine art and began her project called ‘Finding Patterns’ in 2011 at Imperial College London with an ‘Artist in Residence Award’ from the Leverhulme Trust. Since then, her work has grown to involve scientists from other universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and MIT. See her talk here. Both talks were really engaging and offered interesting new perspectives. As Geraldine’s talk rounded off the day, she joined us in Gather.Town for the final networking session and facilitated some excellent discussions!

Examples of Geraldine’s work: Harmony and Universe

Prizes were awarded for the top 3 talks and posters, voted for by the other attendees. This gave us an opportunity to recognise the excellent work being done by PhD students from both institutions and helped to engage the audience. We also held a raffle based on who attended the Perkin Elmer booth, for which they kindly donated 10 £25 vouchers as prizes. This added an incentive for participation as we know this can sometimes be difficult at virtual events!

We know that virtual events can be a challenge and we just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who participated so enthusiastically in the symposium! We hope it was a good opportunity to present your work to an audience of more diverse backgrounds and that you got the chance to engage with each other as much as possible. We look forward to seeing you all in person sometime soon!